The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) received more shipments of transuranic waste in June than in any of the three months since it again began accepting waste from across the Energy Department’s nuclear complex, official records show.
Since reopening its gates in April to waste from across the country, DOE has confirmed receipt of 31 shipments at the underground facility near Carlsbad, N.M. For June, DOE cited a total of 15 shipments: good for a shipping rate of about 2.5 a week, which is DOE’s highest weekly total in any month since shipments resumed. The department only confirms receipt of a shipment two weeks after the waste is disposed of underground.
WIPP, which reopened late last year after a nearly three-year closure sparked by an underground radiation release in February 2014, is the country’s only deep-underground disposal site for the radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste.
Viewed inside and outside of DOE as an indispensable part of the agency’s cleanup of its Cold War nuclear legacy, WIPP has generally fared well in the 2018 budget debates now underway in Washington, D.C. The Donald Trump administration requested $323 million for the mine for the budget year beginning Oct. 1. House appropriators matched that ask in a budget bill due for a floor vote in that chamber next week.
Senate appropriators, meanwhile, recommended $320 million for WIPP in the budget bill they advanced to the floor on Thursday.
